Applying Fukuoka to Poetry

Can we apply Masanobu Fukuoka's 'Four Principals of Natural Farming' to poetry? The principals are: 1. No cultivation. 2. No chemical fertiliser or prepared compost. 3. No weeding by tillage or herbicides. 4. No dependence on chemicals. Here goes:

1. No cultivation – no paper; no page*.


2. No chemical fertiliser or prepared compost – no vowels.


3. No weeding by tillage or herbicides – no consonants.


4. No dependence on chemicals – no alphabets.

*Nevertheless, the perennial problem of representation remains.


Site-specific question: Is the metabolic potential for a biophysical poetry – a poetry of the body and its environment (in an era of unfolding climate chaos and fossil energy descent) – an essential transition from catabolic literatures, which feed upon each other and perpetuate the systems of art that mediate our logic and make us increasingly separate from the experience of everyday life?

Photos: Meg Ulman

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Primitive poetics

On Saturday a few of us adults took 12 boys on a bush adventure for Zeph's birthday. We walked for two and a half hours, stopping to make, observe or find things to collect. One of the activities they were assigned was to collectively build a shelter in ten minutes. The first peg shows the result. At the end of the walk we came across the remnants of a large forest installation I made between 2000 and 2005, where boardwalks and wallaby grass tracks led you through a series of environments subtly altered as physical or biophysical poems.

The type of sedge grass in this forest is the oldest locally living flora. Their origins predate eucalypt forests and are supposedly as ancient as the dinosaurs.

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